Food Webs and Biodiversity
Food Webs and Biodiversity
Food webs describe the interconnected feeding relationships through which energy, nutrients, and biomass move among organisms in an ecosystem. Unlike simple food chains, food webs recognize that most organisms interact with multiple species and may occupy different ecological roles during their lives. Biodiversity therefore consists not only of the number of species present but also of the complex network of relationships connecting producers, consumers, predators, prey, decomposers, and other organisms. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}
Research increasingly shows that biodiversity and food-web structure must be considered together. Species diversity can affect ecosystem functioning through interactions occurring within and between trophic levels, while changes to those interactions can determine whether ecological communities remain stable when species disappear or environmental conditions change. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}
Biodiversity Across Trophic Levels
Biodiversity occurs throughout food webs rather than within a single group of organisms. Plants and other primary producers form the biological foundation of many food webs, supporting herbivores, predators, decomposers, parasites, and other organisms. Diversity at one trophic level can consequently influence biodiversity and ecological processes at other levels. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}
Research across multiple trophic levels indicates that biodiversity contributes to ecosystem multifunctionality. Diverse communities can support processes such as primary production, herbivory, predation, decomposition, nutrient cycling, pollination, and biological pest control. The effects of biodiversity can therefore propagate through entire ecological networks rather than remaining confined to individual species groups. :contentReference[oaicite:3]{index=3}
Plant diversity is particularly important because changes among producers can alter the organisms occupying higher trophic levels. Experimental research in forests and grasslands indicates that plant diversity can promote ecosystem multifunctionality both directly and indirectly by supporting greater biodiversity elsewhere in the food web. :contentReference[oaicite:4]{index=4}
Food-Web Complexity and Ecosystem Stability
Food-web stability depends not simply on how many species exist but on how those species interact. The number of trophic links, strength of interactions, availability of alternative feeding pathways, and organization of species into different trophic groups can all affect ecological resilience.
Trophic redundancy can provide an important form of ecological insurance. When several species perform similar trophic roles, the disappearance of one organism may leave alternative feeding pathways available. This can reduce the likelihood that an initial species loss causes additional secondary extinctions. :contentReference[oaicite:5]{index=5}
Compartmentalization can similarly promote persistence. Food webs organized into relatively distinct groups of interacting species may restrict the spread of ecological disruptions, reducing the probability that extinction cascades move throughout an entire network. :contentReference[oaicite:6]{index=6}
Interaction strength is also important. Natural food webs often contain many relatively weak interactions and fewer strong ones, while the balance and organization of these relationships can influence community stability and vulnerability to disturbance. :contentReference[oaicite:7]{index=7}
Species Loss and Food-Web Collapse
Biodiversity loss can simplify food webs by reducing the number of species, trophic links, and feeding pathways. Because organisms depend upon one another, the disappearance of a species may produce consequences extending far beyond the species directly affected.
Habitat isolation illustrates this process. Large consumers occupying higher trophic positions can disappear particularly rapidly as habitats become fragmented, potentially dismantling complex food webs from the top downward. :contentReference[oaicite:8]{index=8}
The ecological importance of a species also cannot always be determined from its abundance alone. Keystone species may exert effects disproportionately large relative to their numbers because their activities influence competition, predation, and biodiversity elsewhere in the food web. :contentReference[oaicite:9]{index=9}
Losses of ecologically important species can also propagate through regional networks. Research therefore suggests that conservation priorities may benefit from considering a species' position and functional importance within a food web rather than relying exclusively on measures such as species richness or extinction risk. :contentReference[oaicite:10]{index=10}
Trophic Cascades and Predators
Predators can have effects extending through several trophic levels. Declines or removals of strongly interacting predators can produce trophic cascades in which changes in predator abundance alter prey populations, vegetation, nutrient movement, or other ecosystem processes.
Global declines of large predators provide prominent examples of these effects. Apex consumers can influence ecological communities far beyond the organisms they consume directly, meaning predator losses may restructure biodiversity and ecosystem functioning across entire food webs. :contentReference[oaicite:11]{index=11}
The introduction of predators can produce similar cascading effects. Non-native lake trout in Yellowstone Lake, for example, altered predator-prey relationships, zooplankton communities, nutrient transport, and ecological connections between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. :contentReference[oaicite:12]{index=12}
Food-Web Rewiring
Food webs are dynamic networks rather than fixed arrangements. When environmental conditions change or species disappear, surviving organisms may alter their diets and interactions. This process, sometimes described as food-web rewiring, can substantially change ecosystem structure even without complete replacement of the species community.
Research shows that long-term ecological change can cause organisms to modify feeding relationships, potentially creating new pathways for energy movement through ecosystems. Consequently, understanding ecological resilience requires examining changes in interactions as well as changes in species composition. :contentReference[oaicite:13]{index=13}
Habitat Loss, Invasive Species, and Environmental Disturbance
Human activities can alter food webs through habitat destruction, fragmentation, pollution, harvesting, invasive species, and other disturbances. Habitat loss is especially significant because the spatial pattern of destruction can influence whether multitrophic communities remain stable. :contentReference[oaicite:14]{index=14}
Invasive species can simultaneously reduce native biodiversity and reorganize food-web architecture. Changes can occur in connectivity, modularity, diet breadth, and the proportion of organisms occupying different trophic positions. :contentReference[oaicite:15]{index=15}
Pollutants can also have indirect effects. Pesticides, for example, may reduce aquatic biodiversity while disrupting feeding relationships, demonstrating that ecological damage can extend beyond organisms directly exposed to a contaminant. :contentReference[oaicite:16]{index=16}
Climate Change and Food-Web Biodiversity
Climate change can affect entire food webs by changing temperatures, species distributions, population abundance, and interactions among predators, consumers, and producers. Warming may reduce ecosystem stability by altering relationships and population synchrony across trophic levels. :contentReference[oaicite:17]{index=17}
Climate change and biodiversity loss are consequently interconnected ecological problems. Their effects can reinforce one another as environmental pressures affecting individual species propagate through networks of ecological interactions.
Changes can occur even before species become extinct. Declines in older or larger individuals within populations can alter ecological processes and predator populations, demonstrating that food-web degradation may begin well before complete species disappearance. :contentReference[oaicite:18]{index=18}
Agricultural and Managed Food Webs
Food-web biodiversity also contributes to agricultural and managed ecosystems. Multitrophic interactions support pollination, decomposition, nutrient cycling, herbivory, predation, and biological pest control. Understanding these relationships can therefore improve management strategies that depend on ecosystem services. :contentReference[oaicite:19]{index=19}
Habitat creation and restoration can increase food-web complexity. Artificial reefs, for example, may create habitat for additional organisms and expand the number of trophic interactions within coastal ecosystems. Movement of consumers between neighboring habitats can further connect separate food webs by transporting energy and nutrients across ecosystem boundaries. :contentReference[oaicite:20]{index=20}
Food Webs in Conservation and Ecosystem Management
Food-web research has important applications in conservation. Protecting individual species without considering their ecological relationships may overlook indirect effects created when predators, prey, competitors, or mutualists change in abundance.
Food-web models can help conservation planners identify dependencies among species and anticipate indirect consequences associated with protecting or losing particular organisms. :contentReference[oaicite:21]{index=21}
Marine ecosystem management provides another application. Food webs connect individual species and populations with ecosystem resilience and ecosystem services, making trophic information valuable for fisheries management and broader ecosystem assessments. Researchers have consequently developed indicators intended to incorporate food-web structure into evaluations of marine ecosystem health. :contentReference[oaicite:22]{index=22}
Biodiversity, Food Webs, and Ecosystem Services
Food-web structure provides an important connection between biodiversity and ecosystem services. Changes in trophic interactions can influence biological production, resource availability, nutrient movement, decomposition, pest regulation, and other ecological processes valuable to human societies. :contentReference[oaicite:23]{index=23}
This perspective broadens the meaning of biodiversity conservation. Maintaining a list of species is not necessarily equivalent to maintaining a functioning ecosystem. Conservation may also require preserving the ecological relationships through which species interact and collectively sustain ecosystem processes.
Conclusion
Food webs reveal biodiversity as a network of ecological relationships rather than simply a count of species. Producers, consumers, predators, prey, decomposers, and other organisms are connected through pathways that transfer energy and nutrients while influencing population dynamics and ecosystem processes.
Greater biodiversity can provide alternative ecological pathways, functional redundancy, and other mechanisms that contribute to ecosystem functioning and resilience. Conversely, species loss, habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, climate change, and exploitation can simplify or reorganize food webs, sometimes allowing disturbances to cascade across multiple trophic levels.
Understanding biodiversity therefore requires attention both to which species are present and to how they interact. Food-web research provides a framework for connecting species diversity with ecosystem stability, ecological functioning, conservation, and the ecosystem services upon which human societies depend.
Food-Web Stability and Biodiversity
| Multiple Authors | Functional Ecology | 14 June 2026
Nutrient enrichment can destabilize aquatic food webs by altering biomass, consumer-resource relationships, and interaction strengths across trophic levels.
| L. Zhou et al. | National Science Review | 2026
Analysis of 97 aquatic food webs finds that relationships between biodiversity and stability can differ within individual trophic levels versus across entire multitrophic communities.
| C. Cheng et al. | Functional Ecology | 2026
Differences in resource use by producers and consumers can produce contrasting biodiversity-stability relationships within food webs.
| K. Perrelet et al. | Journal of Applied Ecology | 2026
Green-roof food webs can support distinctive ecological communities, while greater habitat depth and ecosystem development may increase trophic diversity and food-web robustness.
| X. Hao et al. | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 2026
Conservation priorities can be improved by considering species' positions and ecological importance within food webs rather than relying only on species richness or extinction risk.
Food-Web Structure, Biodiversity, and Ecosystem Function
| Juan David Carvajal-Quintero et al. | Science Advances | 2026
Freshwater fish food webs have undergone substantial reorganization during the Anthropocene, with biodiversity losses changing trophic structure and reducing the representation of species across portions of the food web.
| Guillaume Albert et al. | Nature Communications | 2026
Research from a large subtropical forest biodiversity experiment shows that interactions among plants, herbivores, predators, and other trophic groups help determine how biodiversity supports multiple ecosystem functions.
| Mengqi Wang et al. | Nature Communications | 2026
A large forest biodiversity experiment finds generally stabilizing effects of biodiversity both within individual trophic levels and between interacting trophic levels.
| Nan-Fei Wan et al. | Science Advances | 2026
Plant diversity can restructure interactions among plants, herbivores, and their enemies, demonstrating how biodiversity at the base of a food web can influence organisms at higher trophic levels.
| Multiple Authors | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B | 2026
Tank bromeliads provide miniature natural ecosystems in which researchers can examine how predators, prey, nutrients, warming, and species loss alter food-web structure and ecosystem stability.
| World Health Organization | WHO | 18 February 2025
An overview of biodiversity explains that biological diversity encompasses genes, species, ecosystems, and ecological interactions and underpins ecosystem services essential to human health.
| Jian Feng et al. | Science Advances | 2025
Food-web structure mediates the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem stability, helping explain why increasing diversity can have different stability effects in different ecological communities.
| N. Pordel et al. | Science of the Total Environment | 2025
A review of biodiversity–ecosystem functioning research examines how species diversity, functional diversity, and ecological traits influence ecosystem processes.
Core Concepts and Educational Resources
| National Park Service | Yellowstone National Park | 18 April 2025
Yellowstone research illustrates how predators, herbivores, vegetation, and environmental conditions interact through trophic cascades while also showing why real food-web responses are more complicated than simple predator-prey chains.
| National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 19 July 2023
Mussels occupy an important middle position in coastal food webs, transferring energy from primary producers to predators and responding to changes in both climate and predator abundance.
| Ocean Wise | Ocean.org | 6 August 2021
An introduction to trophic levels explains how primary producers, herbivores, predators, and other organisms form interconnected pathways for energy movement through ecosystems.
| National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | NOAA | No date
NOAA explains aquatic food chains, food webs, trophic levels, energy transfer, and trophic cascades, providing a useful introduction to interconnected feeding relationships in aquatic ecosystems.
| Smithsonian Environmental Research Center | Smithsonian Institution | No date
Smithsonian researchers study food webs as networks of ecological relationships and examine how environmental change, pollution, habitat conditions, and other pressures reshape trophic interactions.
| Smithsonian Environmental Research Center | Smithsonian Institution | No date
Aquatic food-web research traces the movement of biomass, carbon, nutrients, and energy through interconnected species in marine and freshwater environments.
| Smithsonian Environmental Research Center | Smithsonian Institution | No date
Terrestrial food webs connect organisms ranging from soil microbes and plants to insects, birds, and large mammals, emphasizing that aboveground and belowground biodiversity form interconnected systems.
| Smithsonian Environmental Research Center | Smithsonian Institution | No date
Biodiversity assessment requires attention to predators, prey, producers, and decomposers because ecosystem health depends on maintaining functional relationships throughout the food web.
| Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History | Smithsonian Institution | No date
Biodiversity includes not only the variety of genes, species, and ecosystems but also the interactions connecting organisms into complex ecological networks.
Species Loss and Food-Web Collapse
| M. Reji Chacko et al. | Communications Biology | 2025
Losses of species in ecologically important habitats can spread through regional food webs, demonstrating that declining common species as well as rare species can disrupt ecosystem functioning.
| David Beauchesne et al. | Science Advances | 2025
Ecological interactions can amplify the combined effects of climate change and human pressures, meaning impacts on one species can propagate through marine food webs.
| A. S. Werner et al. | Nature Communications | 2025
The sustainability of harvesting natural resources depends partly on whether food webs can maintain biodiversity and biomass under ecological and economic disturbances.
| K. A. Emery et al. | Scientific Reports | 2025
Food-web structure influences ecosystem multifunctionality in sandy beaches, particularly where communities depend heavily on resources imported from neighboring ecosystems.
Multitrophic Biodiversity
| Greenpeace | Greenpeace | 24 September 2024
An accessible overview explains how diverse ecological communities support food production, freshwater, soil processes, pest regulation, decomposition, and other ecosystem services.
| Samantha Dedman et al. | Science | 2024
A synthesis of shark ecology examines the role of large marine predators in food webs, including their direct and indirect effects on prey populations, habitats, and broader ecosystem structure.
| Multiple Authors | Ecology | 19 May 2023
Aquatic food webs change along environmental gradients, with trophic redundancy and the number of feeding pathways influencing ecosystem functioning and resilience.
| Andrew Dobson et al. | Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution | 2023
The authors argue that food-web ecology should more explicitly incorporate plant-community ecology because plant diversity forms the biological foundation on which many terrestrial trophic networks depend.
| O. Y. Buzhdygan et al. | Journal of Plant Ecology | 2023
Multitrophic biodiversity can support numerous ecosystem functions through predator-prey interactions, pollination, decomposition, nutrient cycling, biological pest control, and other ecological processes.
Plant Diversity and Higher Trophic Levels
| Yi Li, Andreas Schuldt, Xiaojuan Liu et al. | Nature Ecology & Evolution | 2 September 2024
Evidence from forest and grassland experiments shows that plant diversity can enhance ecosystem multifunctionality both directly and indirectly by supporting biodiversity at higher trophic levels.
| A. Amyntas et al. | Nature Communications | 2024
Soil-community history alters biomass and energy movement through belowground food webs, revealing how biological legacies can influence multitrophic ecosystem functioning.
| Fernando T. Maestre et al. | npj Biodiversity | 2024
Research on drylands shows that biodiversity interacts with climate, soils, and other environmental variables to shape ecosystem functioning under increasingly stressful conditions.
Multitrophic Diversity and Ecosystem Function
| D. A. Moi et al. | Functional Ecology | 2024
Long-term changes in biodiversity across several trophic groups alter ecosystem energy fluxes associated with herbivory, carnivory, omnivory, and detritivory.
| N. F. Ishikawa et al. | Methods in Ecology and Evolution | 2024
Integrated trophic position provides a method for measuring food-web complexity and comparing how organisms occupy different positions within trophic networks.
| H. Zhang et al. | Communications Earth & Environment | 2024
A century-long reconstruction of a lake ecosystem shows that interacting environmental stressors can alter multitrophic biodiversity, species turnover, and ecological network stability.
| T. Siqueira et al. | Ecology | 2024
Temporal variability differs among trophic levels, while mobile predators may stabilize larger ecological networks by buffering fluctuations originating lower in food webs.
| Ian A. Hatton et al. | Science | 2024
Large-scale evidence supports the idea that biodiversity can increase ecological stability, helping explain why diverse ecosystems may resist fluctuations better than simplified communities.
| Y. Liu et al. | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 2024
Differences in biodiversity among trophic levels can influence ecosystem stability by providing alternative routes for energy to move through food webs.
Climate Change and Food-Web Biodiversity
| R. K. Kopf et al. | Science | 2024
Declines of old and large individuals can alter ecological processes even before species disappear entirely, with consequences for predator populations and food-web functioning.
| Henrique M. Pereira et al. | Science | 2024
Global biodiversity projections indicate substantial past declines and examine how future policy and environmental scenarios could influence biodiversity and ecosystem services.
| Q. Zhao et al. | Nature Communications | 2023
Warmer temperatures can reduce ecosystem stability through changes in predators, consumers, producers, and synchrony throughout entire food webs.
| Hans-Otto Pörtner et al. | Science | 2023
Climate change and biodiversity loss interact closely, requiring conservation strategies that address both pressures because climate impacts can cascade through ecological communities.
Biodiversity in Agricultural Food Webs
| Daniel Montoya | Journal of Animal Ecology | 2023
Variation in biodiversity-function relationships can be better understood by modeling interactions across multiple trophic levels rather than examining species groups independently.
Habitat Creation and Food-Web Complexity
| J. Nauta et al. | Journal of Applied Ecology | 2023
Biodegradable artificial reefs can increase food-web complexity by creating habitat for organisms and expanding the number of trophic interactions in coastal ecosystems.
| K. L. Wootton et al. | Ecology | 2023
Consumer movements between habitats can connect neighboring food webs and transfer nutrients and energy among ecosystems with different levels of plant diversity.
| J. S. Sinclair et al. | Ecology and Society | 2023
Nutrient pollution, eutrophication, harmful algal blooms, fisheries, and biodiversity interact through aquatic food webs, complicating ecosystem management.
Food-Web Complexity and Ecological Networks
| Multiple Authors | Biology Letters | 26 October 2022
Analysis of predator groups reveals how environmental differences can alter trophic interactions and reorganize invertebrate food webs.
| Multiple Authors | Biology Letters | 29 June 2022
Researchers propose measuring functional diversity through organisms' positions and interactions within food webs rather than relying solely on traditional trait-based measures.
| Multiple Authors | Ecology | 20 June 2022
Diversity among foundational species can propagate through coastal food webs, altering the abundance and diversity of organisms occupying higher trophic levels.
| Ross C. Blackman et al. | Communications Biology | 2022
Environmental DNA was used to reconstruct biodiversity and food-web characteristics across a large river network, demonstrating how trophic relationships change through space and seasons.
| H. C. Ho et al. | Nature Communications | 2022
Aquatic and terrestrial food webs respond differently to environmental gradients, showing that habitat conditions can reorganize trophic interactions and biodiversity in distinct ways.
| Francesco Polazzo et al. | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 2022
Long-term ecological change can cause organisms to alter their feeding relationships, allowing food webs to rewire even when their species composition is changing.
Biodiversity Effects Across Connected Ecosystems
| R. Rangeley et al. | Ecology and Society | 2022
Marine biodiversity in ecologically and culturally important habitats is sustained by energy moving from primary production through benthic organisms to fishes, seabirds, marine mammals, and humans.
Food-Web Diversity and Ecosystem Stability
| Margit Eero et al. | ICES Journal of Marine Science | 19 August 2021
Food webs connect individual species and populations to ecosystem functioning, resilience, and ecosystem services, making food-web knowledge important for ecosystem-based marine management.
| Eoin J. O'Gorman et al. | Ecology | 2021
Changes in multitrophic biodiversity can simplify food webs by reducing species numbers, trophic links, and food-chain length, demonstrating how biodiversity loss affects ecological complexity.
| F. Yang et al. | Communications Biology | 2021
Experimental work shows that both species diversity and food-web structure jointly determine ecological outcomes in a three-level system involving plants, aphids, and parasitoids.
| Chengjin Chu et al. | National Science Review | 2021
A theoretical review emphasizes that organisms occur within complex networks of interactions and that food-web structure can strongly influence biodiversity maintenance and ecosystem functioning.
| A. J. Felson et al. | Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution | 2021
Urbanization can simplify and restructure food webs, disproportionately affecting specialist and rare species while changing interactions among surviving organisms.
Human Impacts on Food Webs
| U.S. Geological Survey | USGS | 23 October 2020
Experimental evidence indicates that pesticide exposure can reduce aquatic species diversity and disrupt feeding relationships, showing how pollutants can affect ecosystems beyond directly poisoned organisms.
| National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 16 July 2020
Food webs are described as networks connecting numerous individual food chains, providing researchers with a framework for understanding both human and nonhuman roles within ecosystems.
| Ivan Nagelkerken et al. | Science | 2020
Environmental change can reorganize trophic pyramids by altering biomass differently at the bottom, middle, and top of food webs, producing unexpected changes in ecosystem structure.
Marine Food-Web Management
| H. Y. Kang et al. | Scientific Reports | 2020
Multitrophic community analysis reveals how spatial and temporal variation in predator-prey interactions creates changing food-web structures.
Habitat Loss, Invasions, and Species Extinction
| Multiple Authors | Ecology | 13 January 2019
Models suggest that intraguild predation can sometimes increase biodiversity across trophic levels and improve ecosystem functioning by restructuring competitive and feeding relationships.
| Roland Ryser et al. | Proceedings of the Royal Society B | 2019
Habitat isolation can dismantle complex food webs from the top downward because large consumers occupying high trophic positions tend to disappear more rapidly than smaller organisms.
Changes in diet as predators grow can substantially modify food-web structure and reduce the strength of fishing-induced trophic cascades, showing why life-history variation matters in ecosystem models.
Habitat Loss and Multitrophic Communities
| Chris McWilliams, Miguel Lurgi and Daniel Montoya | Nature Communications | 2019
Habitat loss can destabilize multitrophic communities, with contiguous habitat destruction producing particularly severe consequences for food-web stability.
| Erin K. Cameron et al. | Ecosphere | 2019
A global review finds major geographic and ecological gaps in climate-change food-web research and calls for more studies encompassing more than two trophic levels.
Predation and Biodiversity Maintenance
| S. Wang et al. | Ecology | 2019
Food-web models show that intraguild predation can sometimes increase species diversity and ecosystem functioning by modifying competition among consumers.
Biodiversity Across Trophic Levels
| Andreas Schuldt et al. | Nature Communications | 2018
Biodiversity across multiple trophic levels contributes to ecosystem multifunctionality, with diversity effects at one trophic level propagating through food webs and influencing other ecosystem processes.
| Dirk Sanders et al. | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 2018
Trophic redundancy can protect ecological communities from secondary extinctions because multiple species can provide alternative feeding pathways when individual species disappear.
| Russell Weterings et al. | Science Advances | 2018
Landscape conditions influence trophic cascades by changing relationships among predators, prey, and other organisms, illustrating the interaction between habitat structure and food-web dynamics.
Food Webs in Conservation and Management
| National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 27 July 2017
Introduction of non-native lake trout into Yellowstone Lake changed predator-prey relationships, zooplankton communities, nutrient transport, and connections between the lake and surrounding terrestrial ecosystems.
| Jamie C. Tam et al. | ICES Journal of Marine Science | 2017
Researchers evaluate practical indicators for monitoring marine food webs and argue that trophic structure should be incorporated into assessments of ecosystem health and biodiversity.
| Multiple Authors | Proceedings of the Royal Society B | 16 March 2016
Species that physically modify habitats can reshape food webs through mechanisms beyond direct feeding interactions, demonstrating how ecosystem engineers influence biodiversity.
| Eve McDonald-Madden et al. | Nature Communications | 2016
Food-web models can improve conservation planning by accounting for dependencies among species, allowing managers to anticipate indirect consequences when protecting or losing individual organisms.
| Gabriel Gellner and Kevin McCann | Nature Communications | 2016
Models of food webs show that the balance between weak and strong trophic interactions plays an important role in determining the stability of complex ecological communities.
Food-Web Indicators and Conservation
| Jean P. Gibert and Jonathan P. DeLong | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 2017
Variation among individual organisms in ecological traits can change predator-prey connectivity and total consumption rates, influencing the structure of whole food webs.
Biodiversity–Ecosystem Functioning in Food Webs
| Multiple Authors | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B | 2016
Biodiversity–ecosystem functioning theory becomes considerably more complex when evolution and trophic interactions are incorporated, because species affect one another through both ecological and evolutionary processes.
| Multiple Authors | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B | 2016
Functional traits determine how organisms interact within food webs, making the distribution of traits across species important for understanding energy flow and ecosystem functioning.
Fisheries and Seabed Biodiversity
| Simon F. Thrush et al. | ICES Journal of Marine Science | 2016
Fishing disturbance to seafloor habitats can alter benthic biodiversity and the food resources available to predatory fishes, producing effects across multiple trophic levels.
Food-Web Stability and Biodiversity Loss
| Jan J. Kuiper et al. | Nature Communications | 2015
Changes in food-web stability can provide warning signs of major ecosystem transitions, linking patterns of trophic interaction to the resilience of entire ecosystems.
| Edoardo Calizza et al. | Ecosphere | 2015
Multiple disturbances can increase food-web vulnerability because the disappearance of one organism can trigger additional extinctions through lost feeding relationships.
| Jonathan S. Lefcheck et al. | Nature Communications | 2015
An analysis of biodiversity experiments across habitats and trophic levels finds that species-rich communities generally maintain a wider range of ecosystem functions than species-poor communities.
Food-Web Architecture
| Miguel Lurgi et al. | Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution | 2014
Invasive species can cause biodiversity loss while simultaneously reorganizing food-web architecture, including connectivity, modularity, diet breadth, and the proportion of basal species.
Fossil evidence can be used to reconstruct ancient food webs, revealing that complex networks of feeding interactions have structured ecological communities for tens of millions of years.
Interaction Diversity and Stability
| Gabriela Peralta et al. | Ecology | 2014
Complementarity and redundancy among ecological interactions can increase community-wide resource consumption while affecting food-web stability.
| Samuel Johnson et al. | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 2014
The organization of organisms into coherent trophic levels helps explain why some complex food webs remain stable despite containing many interacting species.
| Ashley L. Downing et al. | Ecology | 2014
Biodiversity can enhance temporal stability through several mechanisms, including asynchronous population fluctuations and differences among species' responses to environmental change.
Omnivory and Food-Web Persistence
| Pavel Kratina et al. | Ecosphere | 2012
Omnivory can either stabilize or destabilize food webs depending on interaction strength, life histories, and how predators divide feeding among trophic levels.
Foundational Food-Web Research
| Daniel B. Stouffer and Jordi Bascompte | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 2011
Compartmentalization can increase food-web persistence by limiting the spread of extinction cascades between otherwise weakly connected groups of species.
| James A. Estes et al. | Science | 2011
Global declines of large predators can trigger trophic cascades that restructure ecological communities, demonstrating the disproportionate influence of apex consumers on biodiversity and ecosystem processes.
| Multiple Authors | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B | 27 June 2009
Food-web structure connects biodiversity with ecosystem services because changes in trophic interactions influence biological production, resource availability, and other ecological processes valuable to people.
| Multiple Authors | Ecology | 1 June 2009
Quantitative food-web analysis explores how the number, arrangement, and strengths of trophic interactions change as species diversity increases.
| Eoin J. O'Gorman and Mark C. Emmerson | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 2009
Experimental removal of strongly interacting species produced trophic cascades and reduced the temporal stability of important ecosystem processes.
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning Theory
A food-web perspective on biodiversity explores how energy and matter move among species within and across trophic levels and why multitrophic complexity can change biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships.
| Eric L. Berlow et al. | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 2009
Predator-prey interaction strengths can be predicted partly from species biomass and body size, helping researchers understand how complex food webs function.
Food-Web Modules and Biodiversity
| Michio Kondoh | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 2008
Food webs can be understood as networks of interacting trophic modules whose nonrandom organization may help maintain species diversity.
Interaction Strength and Overexploitation
Food webs typically contain many weak interactions and relatively few strong ones, a structure that can influence both community persistence and vulnerability to overfishing.
Keystone Species and Food-Web Diversity
| Robert D. Davic | Conservation Ecology | 2003
Keystone species can exert ecological effects disproportionately large relative to their abundance by altering competition, predation, and diversity within food webs.
Ecosystem Integrity and Food-Web Complexity
| Giulio A. De Leo and Simon Levin | Conservation Ecology | 1997
Ecosystem integrity depends on structural characteristics such as biodiversity and trophic linkages as well as ecological processes that sustain ecosystem functioning.
Freshwater Food-Web Biodiversity
| Multiple Authors | Oxford Academic | No date
Freshwater biodiversity can be examined both as the number of unique trophic positions and as the number of species sharing those positions, with both dimensions influencing energy flow and biomass distribution.
Approaches to Studying Food Webs
| Multiple Authors | Oxford Academic | No date
Food-web research combines observational, experimental, theoretical, and network approaches to understand feeding relationships and their influence on species diversity.
Food Chains, Food Webs, and Trophic Cascades
| Multiple Authors | Oxford Academic | No date
Ecological theory and experiments explain how bottom-up resource availability and top-down consumer pressure determine biomass across trophic levels and generate trophic cascades.
